After I get this post written– because God forbid I not get a blog post written– I intend to be exceptionally lazy for the rest of the day, even by recent standards. I have a feeling that this is going to be a rough weekend mentally and the most difficult thing I want to have to worry about for the next 48 hours or so is preventing myself from blowing any more money on dice this weekend. I literally– this is not a joke, it happened– dreamed about dice last night. I’m fucked up in my brain-parts, I know. I can’t explain it.
But there are books to be read, and video games to be played, and technically I cooked breakfast today so I’ve had at least one Real Meal. I probably need to do something to keep the boy alive– did you know kids are supposed to be fed every day?– but beyond that … eh. It’s Saturday, and I’m in quarantine. I’m gonna Saturday today.
2:24 PM, Saturday April 25: 924,576 confirmed cases and 52,782 American deaths.
It’s weird that taking attendance for e-learning takes longer than doing my grading, right? Because grading is just grading, and because I’m doing everything electronically and I’m a math teacher I’m able to grade almost everything automatically, and attendance is a hideous nightmare involving two different online programs and a spreadsheet as well as backdating everything when kids do assignments from two weeks ago. Which means that every time I do my grading and my attendance I have to check every assignment I have given since this started. And, okay, it’s not the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a teacher or anything, but have you ever had to remember to click something in one place if someone is not clicked in another place? It melts your brain and your eyes after a while, and I was sitting here for probably about 2 1/2 hours tonight getting this done. Attendance in school takes less than a minute per class.
My overall numbers are scary and getting scarier; I’m averaging about a third of my students checking in on any given day, which is … not great, at all, and I expect there to be even more attrition by the end of the year even if it has been shortened. Maybe if I figure out a way to unlock a TikTok video or something every time they do an assignment … ugh. The math team had a meeting today that ended up lasting an hour and a half because we got to talking about what we were going to do this fall if the school year started without the kids in the building, which I am pretty damn convinced it is going to. The long and short of it is none of us have any idea how the hell to handle that, and we’re all terrified of it.
So, yeah, that’s all fun.
8:56 PM, Friday April 24th: 890,524 confirmed infections and 51,017 American deaths. What day next week do we cross over a million infections, do you think? Wednesday?
I was gonna say “Enjoy your Friday,” but it’s apparently Thursday for some reason? So, uh, enjoy your Thursday. Or, hell, enjoy Friday too; no skin off my back.
3:35 PM, Thursday April 23: 856,209 and 47,272. I expect we’ll be over 900K and 50K by the end of the week.
Right now this is my new Facebook profile picture, but I felt like it was necessary to share it here too. Sushi hates me so much, it’s adorable.
The kids appear to be having massive difficulties with the assignment I gave them today. I’ve tried to move on a bit from endless review into new material (effectively the entire fourth quarter has been distance learning, so none of the stuff that is supposed to be covered in the last 25% of the year has been taught yet) and something that probably should have occurred to me earlier occurred to me today.
When I’m teaching in a regular classroom setting, if I notice my first couple of groups having trouble with a specific aspect of something or simply not understanding the way I’m teaching it, or a common mistake I wasn’t expecting, I can adjust throughout the day. If kids in 3rd and 4th hour are frequently making the same kind of error, you can bet that 6th and 7th hour are going to hear me specifically address that type of mistake before I turn the kids loose on whatever their assignment was for that day. And in e-learning, not only do I not really have a way to adjust from class to class, but the vast majority of the time I can’t even tell what mistakes they’re making. This could be fixed somewhat if I adjusted how I was instructing– I’ve been defaulting to mostly multiple-choice assignments in a Google form that can grade itself– but it’s difficult to imagine what I could be doing that would let me see their thinking as they’re making mistakes. I mean, sure, I could ask— I could give them a problem, then they answer it, and then maybe explain in a text box how they solved it, but I know my kids well enough to know that that’s not actually going to be as helpful as it sounds like it could be. I’ve only got about 30-40% of my kids even doing the work on a day-to-day basis, it’s tough enough to get them to watch the instructional videos that are showing them how to do the stuff in the first place, and I have no way of telling whether a kid who got a terrible score on an assignment got a terrible score because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing or because he simply logged on and answered “C” for everything– which I suspect at least a couple of my kids are doing.
I need to figure out a way to get this material to teach itself, effectively– because while there’s less than a month of school left, and maybe only 15 days of actual instruction, there is no way that we don’t lose a substantial chunk of next year to this as well, and when that happens I want to be prepared.
If you’re wondering what I mean by “teach itself,” read this excellent article about how– this is not a joke– the first level of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers teaches you how to play it. That game is a masterclass of tutorial design; I just need to figure out a way to apply that style of learning to math.
It’ll be easy, I’m sure.
6:52 PM, Wednesday (God, is it Wednesday? Is that right?) April 22nd: 837,947 confirmed cases and 46,560 Americans dead. That is a pretty staggering increase in the 31 hours since I last posted.
Y’all know this about me by now: I typically only write book reviews when something is either worth recommending or has seriously offended me for some reason. I don’t write a whole lot of mixed reviews. Every so often I’ll encounter a book that I really liked and can’t explain why, but for the most part my book reviews around here are raves of some variety or another.
(Why is the name of the book not in the title of the review, like usual? I’m actually trying to dodge easy Google hits on this one. I have at least one negative review of a book where I like every other single book that author has written that gets more traffic than it ought to and I don’t especially want that to happen with this one.)
Anyway. I finished K.S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro yesterday. I picked it up based on several strong mentions online from people I trust, plus the author is a Filipino woman and the notion of epic fantasy from the Philippines is attractive.
And … damn. I finished the book, but I finished it seriously disappointed. The biggest problem that this book has is that the main character, the Bitch Queen (the series is actually called the Annals of the Bitch Queen) and the titular Wolf, probably has less agency in this book than any character I can remember short of Arthur Dent. You can get away with writing a book about a character whose decisions have no impact on the plot if you’re writing a comedy about someone the reader is supposed to feel sorry for, but when the main character is supposed to be a queen, only she consistently makes terrible decisions throughout the book and most of the time after she makes those terrible decisions they are immediately rendered irrelevant through external events, you probably need to go back and reconsider a little bit.
I have never in my life read something where a single character is captured or has her plans derailed so many times in the same book, by so many different people. And, like, she’ll manage to escape, or be rescued, and then the exact same shit happens again. And it’s really frustrating, because there’s a good story in here somewhere, to the point where I might actually buy the sequel, believe it or not– it’s just that the main character is damn near unbearable. There are signs of her claiming some agency toward the end of the book, so maybe she’ll be better in the sequel, and once you get beyond the character work, the world is interesting, and the writing is strong, it’s just that Queen Talyien is a black hole of a character and since she’s the sole POV character it’s a real problem.
I spent the entire book wondering what Cersei Baratheon or Celaena Sardothien might do in the same circumstances, and … that’s really not a good sign, right?
Blech. I started Deborah Hewitt’s The Nightjar last night and so far the first 60 pages are pretty promising. Hopefully that’ll wash the taste out a little bit.
11:43 AM, Tuesday April 21: 788,920 confirmed cases (we will likely crack 800K today) and 42,458 American deaths.
I made an attempt to leave the house today– we have something we need to pick up from the post office, and my wife is home today too so we’re not abandoning the boy to his own devices all day, and I thought I’d go ahead and take the hit and go pick up the thing at the post office and maybe hit up Target or something for some printer paper, which we also need to print out his thousands of e-learning assignments.
We have two aging N-95 masks in the house, and my wife has been wearing one of them during grocery trips. I checked out the other one and decided that the elastic didn’t seem likely to hold up for the duration of my trip, so I grabbed one of my bandanas, which, folded properly, makes an acceptable mask– I couldn’t blow any air through it, which, I understand, is the standard to look for for these things.
Turns out that the line at the post office was long, reaching to the door, which got me a dirty look from the dude who I came within six feet of while attempting to actually enter the lobby in the first place. Then I forgot the number for my damn PO Box (I need to write it on the key; this is not the first time this has happened) and while I was putting my key in the wrong box I got hit with a full-fledged nope nope nope nope nope get this thing off your face off off NOW panic attack.
So, no standing in line, no even finding the right box– I hightailed it back to the car and sat there for ten minutes or so, trying to get my heart rate back to something approximating normal and looking up my damn PO Box on my website (PO Box 2663, South Bend, IN 46618! Send me stuff! I’ll never actually pick it up!) and it never actually happened so eventually I just went home. It was a good 10 minutes after I got home that I started feeling normal, too.
This has happened once before while trying to wear a mask– those of you who have been around a while and have really good memories might recall me trying to wear a faceless mirror mask for Halloween one year, and that was before I was actually on anti-anxiety meds.
I guess I’m just gonna stay on quarantine for a while longer, then.
2:28 PM, Monday April 20th: 766,212 confirmed infections and 40,905 deaths.
My wife and I have watched the six-episode McMillions documentary over the last week or so. If you’re not familiar with it, you may remember the McDonald’s Monopoly game that they used to run; turns out that the game was basically rigged from the start, with one single guy taking most of the high-end winning pieces and selling them to a network of people that really wasn’t as spread out or sneaky as it should have been. Something like $24 million in prizes was diverted until an informant clued the FBI in, and then a lengthy investigation ensued, resulting in a whole bunch of people getting indicted, most of whom pled guilty.
The documentary itself is … okay. It’s probably twice as long as it needs to be– certainly an episode or two could have been cut out without really harming anything– and damn near every single person that they talk to over the course of the documentary is some variety or another of douchebag, loser, or both. There’s one guy who they try to make out as a sympathetic victim of the whole thing, which doesn’t really work because he’s just as much of a dick, if not more, than everybody else involved– and, frankly, as far as I’m concerned he might actually be the worst human being to actually take part in the documentary. But more on him later.(*) This will be diverting if you’re home on quarantine and you need something to watch, but it’s not gonna change your life or anything.
And, well, I don’t think this was the intent of the filmmakers, but by the end of the documentary I was pretty well convinced that nothing in the documentary was actually a crime and that no one should have been prosecuted for this.
There is a point, late in the documentary, where one of the defense lawyers points out that his client is being prosecuted for federal mail fraud because he broke a hamburger company’s rules for a promotional game that they made huge amounts of money off of. There is another point where an actual journalist points out that like three or four of the big winners lived in the same zip code and that no one ever noticed.
You know why no one ever noticed? Because they weren’t looking, because no one gave a shit, because no one even conceived of this as a crime until someone tipped off the FBI, who only paid any attention to the case because, as one of the lead douchebags investigators points out, they had been working on “health care fraud” and were bored.
Seriously, this man’s dress shirt is three sizes too big for him for the entire goddamn documentary and it was driving me insane by the end. But I suspect health care fraud probably involves actual victims? And this “crime” does not. Literally no one was hurt by this except for the people who didn’t realize that if you give the dude from the mob half of your winnings and the taxes on your winnings are 40% then you’re not going to actually get a whole lot of money out of it, and I don’t feel bad for them.
McDonald’s was gonna give that money away anyway, and remember they’re *profiting* enormously off of this game. No victims.
You could make a case that someone out there in the world was supposed to be the real winner of the money, or the car, or whatever, but it’s equally likely that those winning game pieces get accidentally thrown away, and at any rate we have no idea who that person is. No victims.
There’s a big deal made about how the marketing company and the “secure” printer went out of business and some people lost their jobs, but as it turns out the only thing they did wrong was hiring the guy who took the pieces, and at any rate they only lost their jobs because the FBI did the investigation. No investigation, no job loss.
You could make an argument that, yes, dude stole the game pieces– but that’s basically stealing office supplies, which isn’t a federal crime, and no law enforcement agency anywhere would ever take it seriously. If I can get you to give me a million dollars for a post-it note that I wrote “ONE MILLION DOLLARS” on, that doesn’t mean that I can get anyone else to give me a million dollars for that post-it note, and no one would argue that you have stolen a million dollars by stealing the post-it. Should McDonald’s have sued the guy? Sure, why not? But it’s not a crime.
They basically openly admit that the only reason they used mail fraud as the main crime they charged these folks with (apparently at some point you have to mail the winning game pieces in for verification) was because they really couldn’t get them on anything else. Because, again, this is breaking the rules of a hamburger company’s marketing scheme, not an actual crime. Crimes have victims. Some danger, either to individuals or society. This has neither. Literally no one anywhere was harmed by any of this, at all, except for whatever cases the FBI was ignoring so they could pursue the “more fun” french fry case.
The biggest bullshit? The longest prison sentence anyone served from this was the main dude, who did 37 months, which shows you how seriously the judge took the case. Three people mentioned having to pay restitution (I assume there were more; a whole bunch of folks pled guilty) and of those, two actually mentioned the amount.
One guy, who has to repay something like three and a half million dollars, is paying about $170 a month. And the ringleader of this entire thing, who diverted $25 million in winning game pieces, is paying $370 a month, or about 2/3 of the amount that I’m paying on my fucking student loans every month, and this is the point where I’m actively fucking angry now, if you were wondering. Because it’s abundantly fucking clear that this money is never getting paid back, so they don’t even care enough to actually pretend that’s going to happen. And McDonald’s didn’t care about the “crime” enough to do even the slightest amount of due diligence on the winners– like the journalist pointed out, several of them lived in the same zip code, and a bunch of them turned out to be related, and no one noticed or cared until the “informant” tipped off the FBI, and– this is great– it turns out that the reason the informant called the FBI was spite.
Because this wasn’t a crime. It was breaking the rules of a hamburger company’s marketing scheme.
I really do enjoy the idea that getting an education fucked up my finances worse than “stealing” twenty-five million dollars, well over three hundred times as much as I borrowed, would have. Tell me again why I’m paying this shit back?
(*) OH RIGHT I FORGOT: they go to some length to make one of the people who took the game pieces look sympathetic, right? And this guy does end up eventually getting acquitted on appeal. But the reason they let him go? Is because instead of being told “Hey, these fell off a truck” or whatever ridiculous justification they used for the other end-user people, this guy is told that the game piece was found by a guy who is going through a divorce, and he wants to secretly sell it so he can hide the assets from his wife, so that she doesn’t get any of the money. And, as he says, he’s been through a divorce himself, so he “gets it,” and he coughs up fifty grand or a hundred grand or however much money they asked him for so that he can prevent a woman who he doesn’t know and as it turns out isn’t real from getting half of the prize.
In other words, the sole “sympathetic” character in the entire documentary is a misogynist piece of shit, and fuck him a lot. As far as I’m concerned he deserves jail more than anyone else in the documentary, because he’s the only person who thought he was hurting someone, and he was just fine with it.
10:35 AM, Sunday, April 19: 735,366 infections and 39,095 Americans dead. It’s early in the day; we’ll be comfortably over 40K dead by the end of the day.
This is one of those days, y’all. Everyone and everything is on my nerves and it is getting harder and harder to deal with the fact that we are governed by the worst and stupidest people among us. Like, it’s fun to yammer on about fucking Darwin Awards and some shit– some of these dumb bastards are going to die because of their stupid little protests, and they’re going to make a whole bunch of other people who are fucking smarter than them sick along the way, and if the fucking virus was somehow able to only infect the motherfuckers who deserve it we’d be fine, but it’s a fucking virus and it doesn’t work like that. Because these ignorant assholes are going to get a lot of people killed, and it’s too bad that we can’t find a way to ensure that the people get killed are all them. “Dying of coronavirus to own the libs” is supposed to be sarcastic, you bumblefucks.
Stay the fuck inside.
If you don’t want to stay the fuck inside, stay the fuck inside anyway.
Enough of this shit.
7:40 PM, Saturday April 18: 732,197 and 38,664, and– guess what– the states that don’t have stay-at-home orders are all seeing spikes in infections. You stupid fucks.
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